Chapter 11 Case Study Hints
Here are some hints to help you get started on the Chapter 11 Case Study, in which you will
demonstrate your skills with hypothesis testing for the difference of two means. Here’s an outline of the
things I will be looking for:
A written report to Dr. Nicholls outlining your findings and recommendations:
1. Which type of sampling method, independent or dependent, was used in this experiment? Explain.
2. Using the appropriate hypothesis-testing procedure, determine whether the control and ESRD groups
have equivalent population means for each of the various clinical and biochemical parameters. Dr.
Nicholls requires that you indicate those parameters that have P-values less than 0.05 and those less
than 0.01.
3a. Detail any assumptions and the rationale behind making them that you made while carrying out your
analysis. Is there any additional information that you would like to have? Explain.
3b. Are there any additional statistical procedures that you think might be useful for analyzing these
data? Explain.
4. Based on your findings, does it appear that the control and ESRD groups have similar initial clinical
characteristics and biochemical findings? Does it appear that the authors of this article were successful
in reducing the likelihood that a confounding effect would obscure their results?
5. Even though Dr. Nicholls does not wish to restrict her research to patients with end-stage renal
disease, how might the information presented for this research assist her in designing her own
experiment?
Obviously, this case study will take some work, but if you set up the first hypothesis test with all
six steps correctly in Question 2, it’s just a matter of copying and pasting those steps, re-naming
the characteristic in the title for each test, changing the numbers for mean and standard
deviation for both groups in your calculator for the next 2-Sample TTest, and revising your
conclusions. Repeat this for all clinical characteristics and biological findings. (In other words,
there are 18 hypothesis tests to complete).
In fact, I’ll give you the first hypothesis test. In fact, I’ll give you the first hypothesis test. You can
download this document under Instructor Handouts in MML and copy and paste this into your case
study.
This should get you going on the Chapter 11 case study. It’ll be time consuming but using hypothesis
testing to compare two means is another critical skill in your study of statistics.
First Hypothesis Test
Age (years)
Step 1:
Ho: